"Moving Happening" - new exhibition of video and photography by Tim White-Sobieski during Lyon Biennale

    /24-7PressRelease/ - PARIS, FRANCE, September 25, 2007 - Two years ago, at the previous Biennale de Lyon, the gallery unveiled video "Vertigo" by Tim White-Sobieski, marking the beginning of its relationship with the artist. In this exhibition, the gallery juxtaposed some of the latest development of White-Sobieski's video series "Deconstructed Reality" with selected photographs in light boxes, which present both lyrical and formal relationships with the video. White-Sobieski's photography departs from myth. The artist is saying that this supposedly "real" world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality" (Jean Baudrillard), that it actually could do without reality. In the video, some frames look like a "non-place, where the concepts disintegrate and we are free" (Baudrillard) of comprehension and information. White-Sobieski deconstructs reality and reassembles it into a communicative language for sharing his understanding of contemporary world.
He breaks down reality and re-arranges it to show constructions independent of space and time. Like cubists and fauvists in painting, White-Sobieski depicts the reaction and not the object in his photo-video projects. We live a heavily loaded time. For Tim White-Sobieski, loaded time should be deconstructed.
White-Sobieski has received a lot of attention recently, with a monograph, "Tim White-Sobieski: Ten Years", published by Fundacion Salamanca in 2004 and an international exhibition that originated at Louis Vuitton Gallery in Paris (ICONS, with Sylvie Fleury, Zaha Hadid, Ugo Rondinone, James Turrell, and Robert Wilson). We found it particularly relevant to provide a focus on the relationships between White-Sobieski's photographs and his kinetic works. This exhibition creates a special link between his multi-channel and "multi-dimensional" moving happening and his large scale photographs. Both the video and photographic works in this show exemplify White-Sobieski's belief that the elements of color, light, object, and media work together while maintaining their individual importance. They stir up both an intellectual and emotional reaction in the spectator. It is through the works in this exhibition that we can trace the artist's commitment to pushing the medium's boundaries and stretching the viewer's visual vocabulary.
Films and installations of White-Sobieski transform the traditional idea of video from static and solid to dynamic, almost as though it were the transformation of a word into a play of words or an image into a performance. Tim White-Sobieski leads us the way in which his mind stripped and scrubbed the fragmented or de-fragmented modern reality. This reality is falling into an infinite loop, like Theatre of Absurd, but making perfect sense. For this reality to work, one must see both the commonality and the antagonism in the choices. White-Sobieski creates art as space for thinking; it should enhance the spirit of questioning the society, the existence, as well as re-think the conventions of art itself.

All inquiries please address to:
Tel +33 (0) 607 38 2835
Romain Houg
Galerie Olivier Houg
45 quai Rambaud
69002 Lyon France
[email protected]

# # #